minute discoveries

While adding support for ISO 8601 date/time strings to Flask-RESTful I was struggling with all that hated Python timezone stuff, specifically with the need to convert a datetime object to UTC timezone. With the libraries that Flask-RESTful was already using this solution looked the easiest:

Even if you want to run a Jenkins server locally for testing purposes to correctly configure a job Jenkins still needs to fetch the source from a repository. With Git this can be easily done without configuring a Git server. Just specify the path to a local Git repo with file:// protocol like this:

First we have to take the Piwik JavaScript Tracking Code from Piwik Administration website and replace Piwik URL and site ID with Jekyll variables, like so (note the {{ site.piwik.base_url }} and {{ site.piwik.site_id }}):

Linux Mint uses it’s customized Firefox theme which has tabs text centered. This is not something you’d want if you are using Tree Style Tab extension. This can be overridden though. In your Firefox profile directory (which should be ~/.mozilla/firefox/<some_random_chars>.default) create a subdirectory called chrome and then create a file userChrome.css in this chrome subdirectory with the following content:

A cool option to install CentOS (and some other distros) is to use Kickstart. One thing I found missing in Kickstart is a possibility of adding some randomness to my installation out of the box. For example if deploying many CentOS virtual machines from one kiskstart file I wanted each of them to have a unique hostname. This is not possible to do with kickstart’s network --hostname=<my-hostname> option because it does not accept any code snippets. Instead this can be done with Kickstart’s %pre script.

Having VMware Player 4.0.2 and VIX 1.11 (the latest to the time of writing this) installed, it appeared that they don’t play well together. Trying to run my VM I was getting The specified version was not found error.

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$ vmrun -T player start ~/vmware/gentoo/gentoo_x86.vmx nogui
Unable to connect to host.
Error: The specified version was not found

A solution to this problem is quite simple. Actually, as far as I can tell, this is a bug. There is a file /usr/lib/vmware/vixwrapper-product-config.txt, which is installed along with VMware Player, and maps VMware Player/Workstation versions to their corresponding VIX API versions. The problem is that the version of VMware Player in this file is 4.0.0, whereas I installed 4.0.2.

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player 14 vmdb 4.0.0 Workstation-8.0.0-and-vSphere-5.0.0

I suspect VMware guys just forgot (and are sometimes forgetting, as this problem has been seen before) to update this file when releasing new version. So what you’ve got to do is to substitute 4.0.0 with the verion of Player you have installed.